June 2007 — News
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Podcasts: Improving Quality and Accessibility
Unfortunately, schools and podcast producers might have limited resources and time to make text equivalents. But there are options to make the process easier.
Consider MAGpie (Media Access Generator), which is free captioning software available from the National Center for Accessible Media. It comes with documentation and a help option via a listserv. The University of Wisconsin also provides an excellent tutorial to walk you through the steps of preparing your system to work with the software, installing MAGpie 2, creating the transcript, importing the transcript into MAGpie, adding timecode instructions to control when the caption is displayed, and then combining caption files with QuickTime, RealPlayer, or Windows Media Player, the three popular media formats.
If you transcribe your own podcast, starting and stopping it to transcribe what you just heard might take several times longer than the podcast itself, depending on how fast you type and how much you can remember at one time. Express Scribe is free professional audio player software for PC or Mac to help transcribers control the speed of playback of the audio using either a foot pedal or the keyboard with hot-keys. It works with Microsoft Word and other word processing software.
Express Scribe also works with speech recognition software like Dragon Naturally Speaking. A few years ago, I experimented with Dragon Naturally Speaking. At that time the product required "training" to my voice. Word recognition wasn't always the greatest and some editing was required, but I was eventually pleased to just talk and have text automatically appear on my computer. However, the latest version 9 is improved with no voice training required and comes with editions that support pre-recorded .wav and .mp3 input.
Alternatively, consider using transcription services, such as CastingWords Transcription Services or Enablr. Some services are better than others. After submitting a three-minute podcast to four vendors, including the aforementioned, the University of Wisconsin-Madison found costs, turnaround time, and errors varied, as did the quality and format of the transcription provided by each. Regardless of the service you choose, you would still want to proofread, particularly for technical jargon, punctuation, spelling errors, fidelity to the original recording, and output formatting.
Conclusion
Deciding what to write and what to say in a podcast is paramount. We're not all professional broadcasters, but listeners and readers will better appreciate your message, if you have also considered the technical merit of your podcast when it is developed. Hopefully, the resources suggested here will help you improve that quality and accessibility.
